Lisa See - Peony in Love

A silk merchant is bringing samples from Suzhou today. I do not ask for gowns for myself, but surely you agree that the hangings in the main hall ( 1 5 3 )

are shabby. If you worked harder, we wouldn’t have to rely so much on my dowry.”

When the servants brought dinner to the table, criticism poured from her mouth. “I don’t eat fish from West Lake. The waters there are too shallow and the fish tastes like earth.” She picked at the pan-fried goose with lemons and ignored the double-boiled chicken with lotus seeds. Ren ate the seeds, which were a well-known aphrodisiac, and put a lot of them in Ze’s bowl, which she pointedly ignored. I was the only one who knew that she was secretly burning lotus leaves and eating the ashes to prevent pregnancy. Same plant, different purposes. I was happy for her choice. A son would solidify her position in the household.

Every marriage encompasses six emotions: love, affection, hatred, bitterness, disappointment, and jealousy. But where were Ze’s love and affection? Everything she said and did was insulting to her mother-in-law and her husband, but Ze seemed impervious. Neither of them dared protest, because daughters of powerful men were allowed to nag their husbands and make their families feel inconsequential. But this was not marriage.

Ze’s parents came to visit. The bride threw herself at their feet and begged to be taken home.

“This was a mistake,” she cried. “This house and the people in it are too low. I was a phoenix. Why did you marry me to a crow?”

Was this how she saw my poet? Was this why she pecked at him all the time?

“You turned down all offers,” the commissioner answered coldly. “I was deep into negotiations with the son of Suzhou’s magistrate. They had a beautiful garden compound, but you wouldn’t consider it. It is a father’s duty to find the right husband for his daughter, but you decided whom you wanted to marry when you were nine years old. What girl chooses her husband by peeking through a screen? Well, you wanted—no, demanded—a mediocre man who lived in a mediocre house. Why? I have no idea, but I gave you what you wanted.”

“But you’re my baba! And I don’t love Ren. Buy me back. Arrange a different marriage.”

Commissioner Tan was unyielding. “You have always been selfish, spoiled, and strong-minded. I blame your mother for that.”

This hardly seemed fair. A mother can spoil her daughter with too much affection, but only a father has the money and power to give a girl the things she wants.

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“You’ve been nothing but a blight on our family from the moment you were born,” he went on, and pushed her away with his shoe. “The day you married out was a happy one for your mother and me.”

Madame Tan didn’t deny this or try to intervene on her daughter’s behalf. “Stand up and stop acting so foolish,” she said in disgust. “You wanted this marriage, and now you have it. You’ve made your fate. Start acting like a wife. Obedience is the only way for a wife. Yang is on top; yin is on the bottom.”

When pleading and tears didn’t work, Ze turned vicious. Her face grew red and horrible words spewed from her mouth. She was like a first-born son—absolutely sure of her position and her right to demand—but Commissioner Tan remained unmoved.

“I won’t lose face for you. We did our best to raise you for your husband’s family. You belong to them now.”

The commissioner and his wife instructed their daughter to behave, gave Madame Wu gifts as compensation for having to accept the company of their unruly daughter, and left. Ze’s disposition did not improve; if anything it got worse. During the day, when she treated the fingers in the household with utter disdain, I didn’t interfere. The nights, however, belonged to me.

At first I didn’t know what to do and Ze often fought against me. But I was so much stronger she had no choice but to obey me. Pleasing Ren was another matter altogether. I learned by trying and failing, by trying and succeeding. I began to follow his cues and react to his sighs, his internal trembling, and the subtle shifting of his body to give me better access. I directed Ze’s fingers along his muscles. I urged her to use her breasts to caress his skin, his lips, his tongue. I made her use the wetness of her mouth to tantalize his nipples, his belly, and that part lower down. I finally understood what Tang Xianzu meant when he wrote about Liniang “playing the flute.” As for that dark moist part of Ze that Ren desired most of all, I made sure it was open and available to him at any moment he chose.

All the while I whispered in her ear the things I’d learned about marriage from The Peony Pavilion and how a wife had to be “agreeable, accommo-dating, and compliant.” When I was a girl, listening to my mother’s and aunts’ endless drills and recitations about marriage, I’d thought I’d never be like them. I’d planned to reject the past, those lessons, and the rigidity of custom and tradition. I’d wanted to be modern in my thinking, but like all girls who’ve just moved sight unseen to their husbands’ homes, I imitated my mother and aunts, calling on all those things I’d so resisted. If I’d ( 1 5 5 )

been alive, I was sure that eventually I would have come to carry locks in my pockets and insist that my daughters follow the Three Obediences and the Four Virtues. I would have become my mother. Instead, my mother’s voice came out of my mouth and entered Ze’s ears.

“Don’t track your husband’s activities all the time,” I instructed. “No man likes to feel his wife watching over him. Don’t eat too much. No man wants to see a wife putting too much food in her mouth. Show respect for the money he earns. Generosity in spending is very different from wasting money. Only a concubine likes to regard a man as a money printer.”

Ze gradually succumbed to my lessons, while I grew out of the girlish romanticism that had made me lovesick. I came to believe that true love meant physical love. I enjoyed making my husband suffer the pain of desire. I spent hours thinking of new ways to prolong that agony. I used Ze’s body freely and without regret, remorse, or guilt. I made her do what she was supposed to do as a wife, and then I watched—smiling, laughing, loving with my entire spirit—as my husband found release in her hands, mouth, and hidden crevice. By now I knew my husband’s greatest desire was to hold Ze’s bound feet dressed in embroidered red silk slippers in his hands, where he could fully appreciate their delicacy, their fragrance, and the pain she had gone through to give him this pleasure. When I saw Ren could do even more with them, I prevented her from pushing him away.

With Ze as my emissary, I experienced sexual love.

That she didn’t feel anything didn’t bother me. That I didn’t know what she was thinking didn’t disturb me either. Even when she was tired, even when she was afraid, even when she was embarrassed, I pushed and used her. Ze’s flesh was there for Ren to taste, fondle, tease, pinch, nuzzle, and penetrate. But over time I saw that her look of indifference and her lack of response disturbed my husband. Whenever he asked what would please her, she shut her eyes and turned her face away from him. For all my efforts, she was less present in the bed with him than she’d been on her marriage night.

Ren began to stay in his library to read until Ze fell asleep. When he came to the room and got in bed, he did not wrap his arms around her to seek warmth, comfort, and companionship for his sleeping hours. He stayed on his side of the bed; she stayed on hers. At first, this satisfied me greatly, because it allowed me to drape my ghostly form around his body like a shroud. I’d stay that way all night, moving as he moved, letting his warmth seep into my coldness. But when he called for the windows to be ( 1 5 6 )